Neil Hopcroft

Coffee built entirely by roberts

I’m a bit online again now – I’ve set up the mini in the corner under the stairs running over bluetooth to the cat at the top of the stairs, where there is just about GPRS coverage. I’m going to be a bit hit-or-miss online for the next few days but its better than nothing.

My new garden. Its a no maintenance sitting outside on long summer evenings kinda garden. And this picture doesn’t really do it justice, i can’t get a wide enough angle for that with this phone. You’ll just have to come and see it in person. They’re still finishing the flat, but i’ve got my sleeping bag tucked away in a corner out the way and a car full of boxes making it mine.

And Bt are useless, but you knew that already.

This doesn’t make any sense, there’s not much traffic and there’s seats on the train. Can someone check that martians haven’t killed the entire population of leatherhead?

Ok, i’m officially bored now. I caught the 733 train from waterbeach. 1000 and We’ve just arrived at welwyn north. Its going to be a long day.

Someone made wikimapia…what I want to do now is to hook into that from my mobile phone, but I get a ‘The application is running out of memory’ error when I try it, I guess google earth is too big for my phone. Maybe I need to disect the protocol a bit to try to find useful things in it….or perhaps have a proxy somewhere that translates locations to ‘interesting things in proximity of these coords’. The next step is to make it transient, such that it starts recording a history of things occuring at a location.

Thats something I’m going to miss about living this far north, even now the sky is a beautiful graduation of shades of purple and blue, with a chink of near daylight in the northern corner, the moon halo’ed in the atmospheric diffraction, but also somehow very much in focus.

One day I will live further north. Of course the danger is the winters, they get awful long and dark.

But for the moment I’ve got my medium-term bright new future to look forward to. I pick up the key for my new flat on Monday, from which time I’ll be spending more time south of here rather than north.

This morning I was trying to catch the tube to Earls Court – I was waiting on the blue line platform, they were having signalling problems so things were running a bit slowly and there were a lot of people about. Finally a train arrived, and we all started piling on, there was quite a push but nothing very out the ordinary for a busy rush hour with signalling problems.

Suddenly the girl in front of me starts violently waving her rather extensive bottom around, which seemed a little unhelpful given quite how crowded the train was, I was being pushed by the people behind me and so push a little to try to get her to stop being obnoxious. Next thing I know shes shouting at me “CATCH THE NEXT TRAIN. YOU! CATCH THE NEXT TRAIN”.

Confused, I got off and walked away, I know when I’m not welcome. Well, sometimes I do anyway.

I think what happened was that I’d managed to brush her behind with the corner of the book I was carrying, which she had assumed was me attempting to feel her.

Of course everyone else on the carriage will have understood her to be a victim and me to be a perpetrator. And there is nothing I could do or say to change that view.

What they can’t see is that I hadn’t noticed she was anything other than a person who was standing their ground a little more than they should in the face of a rush of people, nor that even if I were the sort of guy to go around feeling girls bottoms on crowded tubes that neither her, nor her particular bottom, were in any sense attractive to me anyway, nor that it was the kind of incident that was going to spoil my entire day.

Which has made think a little about stereotypes. Clearly she thinks of herself as the kind of person who has a nice bottom, and that it was reasonable to read things into something which was actually an innocent action – I was lifting my book to chest height so there wasn’t a chance I would accidentally touch someone inappropriately, it just happened that the push of the crowd was a little stronger than I’d anticipated which meant I was a little closer to her than I expected.

The stereotype is of woman as sex object. And man as (ab)user of that sex object. If you have such a strong belief in yourself as a sex object, you can project onto others a strong belief that they are abusers of that object.

Now I can’t sleep.

Someones just pointed out the Guildford festival line up….which makes for interesting reading. Highlights include:

Wonderstuff, Lightning Seeds, Gary Numan, Stranglers, Billy Idol, Sparks, Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, Hayseed Dixie and Blue Oyster Cult.

And given I’m going to be in the area it would seem something of a poor show not to go along. Who else is up for it?

I’ve uploaded some Practical Mechanics pages. Theres still more to come. If you’d like better quality scans let me know and I’ll send ’em over.